Dominators, Super Blocks, and Program Coverage

In this paper we present techniques to nd subsets of nodes of a owgraph that satisfy the followingproperty: A test set that exercises all nodes in a subset exercises allnodes in the owgraph. Analogous techniques to nd subsets of edges are also proposed. These techniques may be used to signi cantly reduce the cost of coverage testing ofprograms. Anotionofasuper block consisting of one or more basic blocks is developed. If any basic block in a super block is exercised by an input then all basic blocks in that super block must be exercised by the same input. Dominator relationships among super blocks are used to identify a subset of the super blocks whose coverage implies that of all super blocks and, in turn, that of all basic blocks. Experiments with eight systems in the range of 1-75K lines of code show that, on the average, test cases targeted to cover just 29 of the basic blocks and 32 of the branches ensure 100 block and branch coverage, respectively.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1994
• Where: POPL
• Authors: Hiralal Agrawal
• Keywords: Basic Blocks, POPL 1994, Programming Languages, Subset Exercises Allnodes, Super Blocks